As a painter, the perception of primary colors is fundamental to my practice, and, universally, primary colors form the ingredients that create any hue. It is in the ways that we configure these most essential of materials that allow our identities to develop and our voices realized. The Primary Color exhibition at The Fredericksburg Center for the Creative Arts provided me with a new curatorial perspective, unlike the process that I generally use. It allowed me to investigate how personality could be embedded within the marks and layers.

By specifying a standard color scheme and confining the works to these three basic standards, what is left are not only fundamental artistic components like form, shape, composition, but also choice. Choice represents how an artist's personality takes what is standard and creates something new. This, to me, is the key to all art. I believe that newness and originality are not made by uninspired developments, but by the revelation and presentation of an identity realized within a long line of learned experiences. When choosing the work for Primary Colors I did so in an attempt to discover something about the artists and how they challenged me, the viewer, to think of expression and growth. What I realized was that I could still be surprised and refreshed by a theme like primary colors.

Vaughn Whitney Garland -- Vaughn Whitney Garland is an independent curator, media scholar, critic, and multimedia artist with a Ph.D. from the interdisciplinary Media, Art, and Text (MATX) program at Virginia Commonwealth University as well as a M.F.A. from the Painting and Printmaking Department from Virginia Commonwealth University. Garland continues to be a community activist in the arts and has held board member positions on several Richmond arts organizations, including the Chair of the Public Arts Commission, Richmond’s Urban Design Committee and the chair of exhibitions at 1708 Gallery. Garland is co-founder of the 2005 and 2006 Richmond Outdoor Sculpture Invitations and curated a sculpture exhibition for the 2013 RVA Street Art Festival.